Bryan Hong

Thrilled to announce a new paper out this weekend in
@cognitionjournal.bsky.social.

Moral psychologists almost always use self-report scales to study moral judgment. But there's a problem: the meaning of these scales is inherently relative.

A 2 min demo (and a short thread):

1/7

A memory can be represented at different levels of granularity, from highly specific to generalized.

Different representational formats of a memory can be used at different times or in different contexts, and draw on different neural representations.

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

An arrow with a LaTeX equation

Trigonometric functions and a unit circle

A bivariate change model with structured residuals

A hierarchical model of cognitive abilities

Now on CRAN, ggdiagram is a #ggplot2 extension that draws diagrams programmatically in #Rstats. Allows for precise control in how objects, labels, and equations are placed in relation to each other.
wjschne.github.io/ggdiagram/ar...

On the left: an illustration from Brooke's 1904 rendition of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where Little bear discovers their favourite chair is broken 😲. On the right, a sketch of what a corresponding "situation model" might contain.

How might stories shed light on brain function? Check out this opinion piece by @alexbarnett.bsky.social and I about the DMN and "situation models" -- our understanding of the current "state of affairs" in a story (or even experience).

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Hippocampal mismatch signals are based on episodic memories and not schematic knowledge | PNAS Prediction errors drive learning by signaling mismatches between expectations and reality, but the neural systems supporting these computations rem...

We make predictions based on general knowledge and/or specific memories. Different brain areas are active when these distinct predictions are violated – and hippocampus selectively responds to prediction errors based on episodic memory.

Cool work by @chrismbird.bsky.social @ayab.bsky.social et al!

<em>Child Development</em> | SRCD Journal | Wiley Online Library Cognitive development is associated with how predictable caregivers are, but the mechanisms driving this are unclear. One possibility is caregiver predictability initially shapes how infants gather i...

Happy to share "The Dynamics of Caregiver Unpredictability Shape Moment-to-Moment Infant Looking During Dyadic Interaction," out now in Child Development thanks to a large team of people I worked on this with! srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...

📣 New preprint from the SCIMaP team!

Across three studies, we show that communicating the economic impact of NIH funding cuts—especially with interactive quizzes and maps—decreases approval and motivates action to oppose the cuts, across the political spectrum. 🧵 1/8
osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper with @mujianing.bsky.social & @prestonlab.bsky.social! We propose a simple model for human memory of narratives: we uniformly sample incoming information at a constant rate. This explains behavioral data much better than variable-rate sampling triggered by event segmentation or surprisal.

Comment: Rethinking behavior change interventions in policymaking

📢 New commentary out today in Nature Human Behaviour!
We argue that behavior change interventions often suffer from a one-sided success focus. But failures may reveal structural barriers people face.

🔗 rdcu.be/ex8hR

#BehavioralScience #PublicPolicy

Perceived community alignment increases information sharing - Nature Communications Information sharing is a ubiquitous and consequential behavior. Here, the authors use neuroimaging and behavioral studies to show that people are driven to share information that they believe will be ...

Excited to ✨share✨ that our paper on ✨sharing✨ is published! Across 3 studies that build on one another, we show that perceived alignment with one's peers increases the likelihood of information sharing.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

The self-reference memory bias is preceded by an other-reference bias in infancy - Nature Communications A classic feature of human memory is that we remember information better when it refers to ourselves. Here, the authors show that before the emergence of self-concept, infants instead remember informa...

Sharing our new paper published today in Nature Communications. In my view, this is our clearest demonstration to date that something profoundly changes in how infants encode the world around them before and after the emergence of self-representation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Proud to share the first preprint of my PhD w/ @barense.bsky.social & Mursal Jahed:

“Putting the testing effect to the test in the wild: Retrieval enhances real-world memories and promotes their semantic integration while preserving episodic integrity”

See thread! 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

As federal funders desert mentorship programs for marginalized students, trainee-led initiatives fill the gap Grassroots organizations, led by graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, are stepping up to provide neuroscience career training and guidance for students from marginalized backgrounds—and…

In our first “Postdoc perspectives” essay, @fleabrained.bsky.social and @maribel-patino.bsky.social explain how grassroots organizations led by trainees are stepping up to provide career and mentorship guidance for neuroscience students from marginalized backgrounds.

#neuroskyence

bit.ly/4csFx0B

CNS 2025 presentations from the Barense lab

If you're at #CNS2025 come check out our lab's Sunday line-up of posters from @catalinayang.bsky.social, @bryanhong.bsky.social, @nellymatorina.bsky.social, and @laurenhomann.bsky.social.

Are you doing EMA research and wonder how to go about it? In recent work we've adressed some open questions and challenges, here is a brief summary of papers and materials.

🧵 #PsychSciSky 🧪 #StatsSky

Thrilled to see this paper out in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social after years of work by Drs. @diamondn.bsky.social and @stefsimpson.bsky.social, with Drs. Stuart Fogel, Daniel Baena, and Brian J Murray!

@baycrestfoundation.bsky.social

Grateful for the chance to share my thoughts on responsible use of LLMs in psychology research @spspnews.bsky.social #spsp2025. Here's a summary of my presentation for those who missed it. Thanks to @ashwinia.bsky.social for organizing this panel!

How should LLMs be used in psychology research? 🧵

“I am in here!” It's a sentiment I've seen expressed time and time again from non-speaking autistic individuals who were thought to be unable to express their thoughts - but ultimately gained access to communication. Hearing this call, my research is expanding in some new directions.

Schemas, reinforcement learning and the medial prefrontal cortex - Nature Reviews Neuroscience A computational account of how schemas are learned through experience is lacking. In this Perspective, Bein and Niv synthesize schema theory and reinforcement learning research to derive computational...

Excited to share this perspective with @yaelniv.bsky.social about how schemas might be learned and instantiated via reinforcement learning, latent cause inference, and dimensionality reduction, and what's the medial prefrontal cortex might be doing for all of these www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Chinatown Memory Collectors - Spacing Toronto A shiny sword, a stack of red packets, old Chinese books and brochures, a wooden folding fan, a souvenir mug, and faded photos of seniors – all are carefully displayed on a large round table draped in...

A exhibition at Waterloo architecture collects memories and mementos of Toronto's Chinatown, along with scale models of restaurants, to reimagine community heritage through storytelling. spacing.ca/toronto/2025...

Visual highlighting how sociodemographic identities influence brain, behavior, and brain-behavior relationships. Figure caption: key goal of research in the brain sciences is to capture relationships between the brain and behavior. When studying these brain–behavior relationships, it is crucial to recognize that sociodemographic factors, such as sex, gender, race, ethnicity, education, religion, spirituality, health, language, environment, age and socioeconomic status (among others), can independently and interdependently influence these reciprocal associations.

Thrilled to share our latest work on the importance of considering social identities in brain imaging research, now out in @natureneuro.bsky.social.

rdcu.be/d4XWM

We have a new paper explaining all the ways you can use natural language processing to analyze text data in @natrevpsych.bsky.social

We provide user friendly recommendations for using NLP to ensure rigour and reproducibility

Here is a free link: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Grief Makes Us Time Travelers (Gift Article) A neuroscientist studying memory, I used to believe time was linear. Then my mother had a stroke.

Honored that a piece I wrote made it to NYTimes. It’s about how my mom’s stroke changed my connection to time, science, and nature. What a privilege to honor my mom in Modern Love.
Below is a gift link. Let me know your thoughts 🙏🏼

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/s...

Our JSS article is out!

And now I get to focus on {marginaleffects} 1.0.0. Stay tuned.

www.jstatsoft.org/article/view...

It takes a LONG time to manually score autobiographical memory narratives for internal and external details (in Autobiographical Interview terms). Here, we report a new model that automates this process, matching manual scorers, but much faster (5s instead of 10m per memory). osf.io/preprints/ps...

I want to draw attention to a special issue that Lila Davachi and I put together to memorialize our friend and colleague Sarah DuBrow. It’s full of papers inspired by her work and her being from a group of collaborators, friends, and fans! Thanks @bradpostle.bsky.social for helping make this happen.

How can we motivate action to address climate change? We tested 17 psych interventions at once in a tournament! @falklab.bsky.social

If you’re attending #psynom24, come to my talk from 11:40-12 TOMORROW (11/22) to find out the winning strategies! Marquis B-C!

@psychonomicsociety.bsky.social

Would love to be added — thanks, Allie!!

Would love to be added too, thanks for sharing!